Edward Snowden Once Again Jumped Into The Debate Of Aadhaar, Supporting Ex-RAW Chief

The huge Aadhaar debate once again joined by Edward Snowden(Central Intelligence Agency employee) recently. He with a tweet jumped into the debate of Aadhaar.

A former head of R & AW, India’s external intelligence agency authored an article on Aadhaar and Snowden who was involved in exposing a surveillance operation operated by an American Intelligence Agency shared the article and expressed his views.

Snowden shared the article of Verma and said, “Rarely do former intel chiefs and I agree, but the head of India’s RAW writes Aadhaar is being abused by banks, telcos, and transport not to police entitlements, but as a proxy for the identity-an improper gate to service. Such demand must be criminalized.” However, Snowden is accused of leaking the classified information of US.

Also, Snowden replied to UIDAI’s tweet: there are companies that ask citizens for their Aadhaar numbers and these companies have databases too, “That [UIDAI’s assertion] might be true if banks, landlords, hospitals, schools, telephone & internet companies were prohibited by law from asking for your Aadhaar number. But any Indian can tell you they’re asked for their number by non-government entities.”

Earlier too, Snowden has put forward his views on Aadhaar. And once again, he tweeted in support of an Indian journalist who talked about accessing Aadhaar data as Aadhaar data was available for sale.

Rachna Khaira, journalist from Chandigarh

A Chandigarh based journalist Rachna Khaira faced a police complaint filed by UIDAI in response to the report on the alleged Aadhaar data breach. However, UIDAI came under criticism for this action. And Snowden about the journalist tweeted, Khaira deserved an award instead of being named in the police complaint.

Snowden’s tweet: “If the government were truly concerned for justice, they would be reforming the policies that destroyed the privacy of a billion Indians. Want to arrest those responsible? They are called @UIDAI.”

And now, after tweeting in support of the journalist and backing the RAW chief, he also retweeted a few other posts on Aadhaar. Among all his tweets, there was a retweet on Troy Hunt(a security researcher who helps internet users to find out if their identities have been compromised in data breaches).

Troy Hunt

On retweet to Elliot Alderson(a security researcher who claimed to have found a vulnerability on the Aadhaar platform) “Is Aadhaar hack-proof”? Hunt replied, No definitely not.

Aadhaar’s debate is raising its head for quite sometimes now. It is coming to a head in India with a Constitutional bench of the Supreme Court which is expected to begin hearings soon on all the petitions that are challenging the constitutionality of the Aadhaar.